Mark-Paul Gosselaar: Saved By the Bell Is "Not a Great Show"

Mark-Paul Gosselaar should be sent to Principal Belding's office for those remarks!

Gosselaar got his start playing Zack Morris on the early '90s high school sitcom Saved By the Bell, but 18 years after the show wrapped its run, the actor says he doesn't realize why TV fans were so enamored by A.C. Slater, Kelly Kapowski and the rest of the Bayside Tigers.

"It's not a great show," Gosselaar, now 38 and starring on TNT's Franklin & Bash, tells Yahoo of his former series. "The writing is kind of hokey… it's very much a piece of that time."

That's not to say Gosselaar wrote off his time on the NBC series -- which segued into a four-season stint on NYPD Blue -- as a total loss.

Cast of Saved by the Bell, 1989NBC/Courtesy Everett Collection

"We just thought we were doing a small little Saturday morning show and no one was watching," Gosselaar says of his time on set with costars Mario Lopez, Tiffani Amber Thiessen, Dustin Diamond,Elizabeth Berkley and Lark Voorhees. "We were almost canceled every season. So we never got big heads."